The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I feel like this is one of those things I’m just way, way behind on, and the whole rest of the internet already knows about it, but seriously, have you read the stuff that Chris Sims does over at his Invincible Super-Blog?

I guess nowadays, he’s doing the freelance writer thing, and most of his posts are just links to stuff he wrote elsewhere, but let me tell you: the stuff he wrote elsewhere is excellent, as well as the stuff on the blog itself. I basically barreled through an entire year of posts the other day, and was laughing a large amount of the time. It started with me learning about the AMAZING WONDER that is Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose, and skyrocketed from there, with me reading in-depth analysis of gender-swapped pinup fanart and Wonder Woman’s new costume and so on. (As a side note, I had heard about this costume change, but hadn’t seen it before that article, and I have to admit, it looks really good. More practical and less stupid. I don’t know why people were bitching.) It’s all really good reads. He’s a very funny guy (and it seems like his fellow writers at ComicsAlliance are too) and you should enjoy his stuff.

It always puts me in a weird situation when I read something like this. I mean, I know ABOUT comics, but I don’t know comics. I’m not a comics person. It’s always interesting to dive deep into a fandom I’m not a part of and see how very similar it is to what I am about and also how different. I know just enough to get the jokes, but I’m also learning. It’s a learning experience! So that’s nice.

Anyway, Chris Sims. Cool dude who actually responded with a thanks to my twitter thanks. Cool dude. The end.

Have you heard about Catherine?

Basically, the people behind P3, including such awesome individuals as Shoji Meguro, are making a game for 306 and PS3. It’s supposed to be an action game, and it’s supposed to be “adult” and “erotic.”

And they’ve put out a trailer.

Frankly, I think the game looks fantastic. Little is known, besides that it is an “Action” game, but I have a lot of faith in this team.

While weird and backwards in a lot of ways, Persona 3, 4, and other SMT games have always been very mature in many ways. They tackle interesting issues, and have actually interesting plots. They’re not perfect, of course (Example: Their treatment of Kanji in Persona 4) but they understand they’re writing for a mostly adult audience and they make that work. The problem has always been, in my eyes, that using high schoolers again and again, they’re kept from really tackling more deep subjects. From the moment I played Persona 3, I wanted to play a game like that as an adult, with adult issues and juggling adult schedules. I wanted that very much.

Now, I don’t think this is going to be exactly that. It’s not a Persona game. But it already has the elements. A dream nightmare world where most of the gameplay will probably take place. A real world with obvious elements of at least dating this Catherine character, if nothing else. This could be what I wanted. On top of that, it’s dealing with a very deep subject, one I’ve worked with myself. Sexuality has plenty of interesting ways it could be used in a game like this, and I hope that this game isn’t shy about exploring them.

Again, there are potential worries. Will they be mature enough to make an actual game? Will they treat the subject matter in the right way? Only time will tell. I have optimism, though. Gamers have grown up. Games should grow up in this way, too.

I’m sure I’ll buy it day 1.

Okay, so. I figured out why I don’t like Flipflip.

My brother’s dog, Flapjack, is not an evil dog. He is not filled with evil feelings and such. He’s super-hyper, of course, as rat terriers tend to be, and that is kind of annoying. He also nips at me whenever I try to pet him. He also kicked me in the face and bloodied my lip. But he’s a dog, none of that is really serious.

It’s how mean he is to Molly, my Mom’s dog.

Now, I like Molly. I always say hi to her, pet her, and such. She’s pretty weird sometimes. Very picky about things. But she’s a nice dog.

Flapjack is being over here because Jonathan, Shauna, and Spantsinton are off doing their thing in Chicago. He runs around like a madman, and whenever I try to pet Molly, he will seriously climb on top of her, knock her over, and otherwise beat on her and make her growl and bite at him in anger, just to get me not to pay attention to her. This is so rude, and a complete dick move! And I do pet him, and say hi. At least, when he’s not trying to bite me. It’s not like I’m ignoring him.

That’s what makes me not like him. He’s keeping me from doing something I want to do, namely pet my dog. Everything else I can write off as being dog things. Hell, even him peeing everywhere when he’s nervous. He’s an animal, and that shit happens. But it’s just how he’s consciously keeping me from spending time with my dog. On purpose, stopping me. That’s what makes me unhappy.

But he’s still here all weekend! Oh well, my parents will take care of him. And I will do lesson plans. Joy of joys.

Starcraft II is definitely a video game where you game up all the videos, and then some things explode, and you mine a mineral.

I don’t really know what there is to say about it.

They’ve done a great job retooling the single player campaign to make it interesting, and every level has enough different in it to make it super exciting and fun. The multiplayer is just as fun as it ever was, even though they totally fucked everyone over with their horrible Custom Maps system.

Basically, it’s Starcraft II.

I mean, that’s cool. I’m enjoying playing it with people. But frankly, the single player can’t hold my interest, and I’m not all that good in Multiplayer. I keep teaming with Essner against online people, and he does everything and I, maybe, take out one thing with a Thor or something. Thing as in turmulent, not as in base.

I just can’t get into RTSes anymore. I used to play them all the damn time, and I had so much fun. In the end, though, I think it was almost purely the social aspect. RTSes were one of the few games, back in the day, that I could play with a group. I played Warcraft II and the original Starcraft with Essner all the damn time on dial-up back in the day. I stopped playing them, though. Getting better at them isn’t interesting to me, and it only takes so long to try out the units, do some cool things, and be done with it. I just can’t get excited about build orders.

Starcraft II is excellent. I’m not sad I bought it. I will continue to enjoy playing the occasional multiplayer match, and maybe I will polish off the single player at some point. However, it’s just not really my thing anymore. I’m not an RTS player. I kind of knew that going in, though. I knew this would happen. I just didn’t want to admit it out of nostalgia.

I’m on the verge.

It’s all coming to a head.

More overused metaphors.

I’m seriously so close. So very close.

Fuck.

The moment before is always the worst, you know? Once you get on stage, then it’s easy. Once things are out in the open, there’s no longer any problem. But until then, until you make that step… it’s painful. It’s crazy. It’s tough.

It’s very tough.

I’m going to make it through this, and I am going to be the better for it. Sometimes, I just need to tell myself that. Sometimes I need to keep myself going. Keep myself from running away. Locking myself in here, with this computer, and never coming out. But no, I don’t need to do that. I’m going to make it through this.

Fuck.

We drafted Magic 2011, the 12th edition that comes out in 2010 today. In a surprising upset, Jonathan was the complete loser, and everyone else tied for first. (This is the problem with a four-person Round Robin tournament, though it’s not like we particularly care.) Everyone actually had a really well-done deck this time, even if we teased Spants on kind of falling into his. (He opened like 3 huge White bombs.) Once again, this is kind of strange, as normally one person has one deck that is just far and away the best. Everyone was rocking different strategies, but everyone had a pretty functional deck that held it’s own.

The draft itself was fun, but it really made me think more about how much I like what they’ve done to the core set. I have made many a joke about the horrible naming of the new core sets, but I think they’ve done a fantastic job. No longer is the core set just the place where you get the expensive dual lands you need. They’ve stepped up the kind of cards they put in there, and started creating new ones for it. They’re still less complicated than the other sets, but they are much, much more dynamic than playing with the old core sets.

In fact, what you end up with is a strangely “pure” Magic experience. When playing in block, the game is normally about trying to exploit the various specific mechanics that only exist in that block to your advantage. When you do that, you lose a little something. You lose a bit of what made Magic cool in the first place. These new core sets feel more like playing Magic back when I started. The game becomes less about getting the most of certain toolsets and keyworded cards, and more about monsters banging into each other, and making sure you have everything in the proper ratios to make that work. There’s enough variation and strategy to keep it interesting, but it’s much more “Magic how you remember it” and less “Super-boring simple Magic.”

In a world when I don’t play Magic much, and don’t have a lot of time to devote to deck building, I find that really cool. There’s still plenty of other cool Magic things out there, of course. But that’s pretty neat.

Even if I poke fun, I approve.

When I dream, which doesn’t happen often, it’s normally narrative.

What I mean by that is, oftentimes when I dream I understand that I am the narrator of a story, and I keep the story going in a way that makes sense for the characters, whether it be people I know, or some random shit my brain puked out. I often don’t remember all of the actual dream, or even much of it. What will happen, though, is that I will wake up, slightly, and continue the story as I have been. Without even thinking about it, my mind keeps going and narrating. Until I get fully awake, it can be hard to stop this. I get some kind of drowsy need to reach a stopping point in the story.

That’s all well and good when they’re good dreams. I could keep telling those for awhile, no problem. Lately, they haven’t been, though.

I’ve been having near-constant dreams about bad things happening to me in some regard. I lose someone. I scream at someone and get really mad. I lose something and go berserk. The other night, the dream was that I got my car stolen, right before some sort of fancy concert that Jonathan and Shauna were going to that I really wanted to attend. I was dealing with something with my parents up until the very last moment before I had to leave, and then I noticed my car wasn’t there. I had to work on getting it back, and I never got to go to the show. I was so angry.

And I woke up so angry.

Dreams are just too real sometimes… I don’t know, my mood is fragile enough these days. It annoys me that my subconscious is making me wake up feeling like shit again and again. It just makes me feel stupid and weak to be so upset by such things. Then again, I guess in a lot of ways I am. I crumble and crack and fall apart again and again. It’s silly.

I mean, I’ll survive. I have so far, somehow. I’ll make it. I guess I just wish it would be easier. And that something as simple as my dreams would co-operate with my plans.

I’ve been playing Persona 3 Portable, so I was once again struck by the most amazing of battle themes. No, not Mass Destruction. After the Battle, the fight victory music. Maybe this sounds weird, but this is by far my favorite bit of music in the game. Give it a listen while I ramble about it for a bit.

I feel like this little song is a success on so many levels. It fits perfectly with the whole music themes of the game for one. It has the sort of hip, pop-y sensibilities of the rest of the game in the guitar bits that come in after a little bit. It’s also completely functional battle victory music. But I feel like it does more than that. I feel like it reflects the themes of the game in general.

Most RPG victory tunes are extremely happy. I mean, you know, like, the classics of Final Fantasy. These songs say, “We did it, we won, everything is awesome now!” It’s a celebration of an accomplishment. Ironically, any single battle in most of those games ISN’T an accomplishment, even though it treats it like one.

Persona 3 takes a more sinister take. It’s darker. There’s a bit of that “we won” excitement, eventually, but that isn’t where it starts. It starts with a very dark little melody and goes downward. While Final Fantasy is trumpeting the victory from the heavens, Persona 3 is saying, “This is only the beginning.” The fight is over, but the battle has yet to be won. It’s pessimistic, like most of the game it’s around. Because, let’s face it, there’s always going to be another encounter. There’s always going to be another fight. The game knows it. It uses it.

I just find that refreshing, I guess. It’s different. This is the track, more than anything, that sticks out and stays with me from that game. (Well, besides Mass Destruction. Nobody can escape the BABY BABY BABY BABY BABY!)

I don’t have anything interesting to say, so you get to hear about a dream instead.

I was some sort of wizard or witch, and I was being held captive in a castle and forced to work. I couldn’t remember anything about where I came from or what I was doing there. It was some sort of memory wipe, I had decided. However, I could still remember how to use magic, and due to incredible incompetence on the part of my captors, I still had my wand. So I bided my time, working away as a slave, preparing to break free.

Eventually, I got brought before my captor, and in a daring feat of wand-play, started fucking up the joint and blasting my way out of there Harry Potter Style. I soon escaped.

And then I woke up.

Now, when I say me, I mean my character in the dream. Because my character woke up, and was looking down on a miniature DnD dungeon version of the castle. It turned out that this was some sort of MGS Virtual Reality training for magic users. This capture scenario was a common one used in training.

I thought that was cool.

Dream time then flashed forward and I was then training people using this same board, only this time I was the dungeon master, moving pieces to manipulate their training and such.

Then I actually woke up.

Yeah, so… wizard VR training via Dungeons and Dragons. Sounds like a good plan. Let’s get that implemented.

I’ve been watching Spoony’s Wrestling Rants pretty religiously since he started them.

The question is, why am I doing this?

I have never, ever followed wrestling. I mean, I think I remember being sort of interested for an extremely short while as a child? At the very least, I know I went to see some sort of live WWF show at some point. Whether that was something I wanted to do or something my parents thought I’d enjoy, I honestly have no idea. I also remember having great times with the N64 WCW vs NWO game that everyone loved, because everyone loved it. Scantily-Clad Hulk Hogan was just going to kick some ass. That’s all there was to it.

And that’s basically my entire experience with professional Wrestling.

But I’m spending hours listening to these blow by blow readings of notes from the shows as they air now. Nothing I hear makes me actually want to watch the shows. Nothing about them makes them seem good, perse. I continue to watch. (Well, more listen, I tend to just put it on in the background.)

I mean, Spoony is a funny guy. I enjoy hearing him talk about things, even completely unscripted like that. That’s certainly part of it. I think more of the reason I watch, though, is just the passion he puts into these breakdowns. He is very passionate about wrestling, and is annoyed to see it in the garbage. I’ve been that sort of fan before, who was loving something, and saw it fall apart in front of them. (Let’s say, as an example… Harry Potter as J. K. Rowling developed protection from editors and started doing dumb things.) I have been there. Granted, I can’t remember being there with something that constantly ups and downs week after week like this wrestling obsession seems to. But it’s a sort of love/hate that I think all people have about something, whether it be a show or, say, a sports team I’d guess, if you were the kind of person who enjoyed a sporting event. It’s a very natural, real sort of feeling. It’s very, very relatable, even though I only vaguely know what Spoony is talking about half the time. (A lot of the names I get are from my playing through of the excellent TNA iPhone Wrestling RPG.)

So I keep watching and listening and absorbing more knowledge about wrestling than I ever thought I’d know. I suppose that’s alright.